intelligibility, comprehensibility and accentedness

There are three common ways of analysing an English learner’s pronunciation: a) intelligibility, b) comprehensibility and c) accentedness.

Intelligibility refers to the ability of English speakers to understand your pronunciation. This is the most important aspect of your pronunciation.

Comprehensibility refers to how much attention or effort is required when listening to your pronunciation. Ideally, it should not require too much effort to understand you. Comprehensibility is also very important, but not as important as intelligibility.

Accentedness refers to how strong somebody’s foreign accent is. This is the least important aspect of your English pronunciation. Everybody has an accent. I have a Canadian English accent. Other people have American accents, Australian accents or accents based on a foreign language. But keep in mind – people can understand you and understand you relatively effortlessly most of the time even if you have a foreign accent.

Most research into the learning of pronunciation shows that age is the most important factor in learning the pronunciation of another language. Almost without exception, young children who move to an English-speaking country before age 7 or 8 will develop an accent that is the same as monolingual English speakers who were born in that English-speaking country. Generally speaking, people who move to an English-speaking country after puberty will have a noticeably non-English accent.

So, you need to be realistic when it comes to improving your English pronunciation if you moved to Canada, the US, the UK etc. as an adult. Chances are, you will never sound like a native speaker. But research shows, that pronunciation training can noticeably improve your pronunciation. And keep in mind – even if your accent isn’t “perfect” – that’s OK, we will still understand you, most of the time, often almost always. We humans have a remarkable capacity for language. And that includes understanding foreign accents – particularly when we have some experience listening to a particular non-English accent.